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Old 06-29-2009, 06:41 PM   #51
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Originally Posted by freetrader View Post
<snip pointless speculation about claims no one made>

Is there evidence that a single person ever made any claim about him? ...
No, in fact, there is no evidence that anyone ever wrote about Jesus from personal knowledge. That is why the hypothesis that he didn't exist can't be dismissed.

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... Who made the decision to sneak him into the holy book, and why? Why did they choose him?
"Jesus" is the same name as "Joshua," Moses' lieutenant who led the Isrealis into the promised land.

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<snip vain attempt to support the existence of miracles>

Wait -- what "mission"? Mission to accomplish what? How do you know [Paul] had a "mission"?
Paul gave himself a mission. Do you need any more?



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... The question is not why they believed it. The question is: Why did the promoters, the Hellenizers creating this new religion for the Gentiles, choose an unlikely unknown figure as the center hero for this new religion? ...
Every detail about Jesus in the gosple stories has some significance - it relates to the Hebrew Scriptures, or to some Hellenistic heroic value. You are asking why some creative authors created the hero that they did?


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Do you suppose they deliberately chose a nobody? ...
An obscure suffering servant who disguised himself as a selfless wandering preacher was a good solution to various problems.


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But then you have to assume all the Hellenizers came together and agreed on this one obscure person to make into their god. Without such a consensus, the different Hellenizing factions would have arbitrarily chosen different savior figures, and we'd have at least a dozen "christs" today, or scores of them, rather than just one. . . .
But there were more than one Jesus' being preached. Who was Paul referring to in 2nd Corinthians 11:4 when he warned against those who preached "another Jesus?" ??

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Did Paul himself believe his own message? Did he really believe Christ resurrected? If so, why did he believe it? He must have heard this from others who believed it. . . .
Do you even read the Bible? Paul claims direct revelation from the risen Jesus, and that he got his gospel from no other man.

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Magic is never an intelligent hypothesis to explain anything.
If this is a way of saying nothing can ever happen that is unexplainable within the currently-known science, you are certainly mistaken.
Magic is a lazy way of explaining anything.

You write too verbosely, freetrader, as if you are trying to convince yourself. You're not convincing anyone else.
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Old 06-29-2009, 08:54 PM   #52
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Default Less plausible vs. more plausible

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If you entertain the hypothesis that Jesus really did perform miracle cures and that his resurrection really did happen, then you have a clear explanation for how the account of him spread beyond his death via word-of-mouth and finally led to the New Testament documents which we know did emerge.
Not really, because nonsense claims of equal caliber were commonplace at the time, and widely accepted as true.
In other words, stories of unlikely events like miracles are easy to explain without needing any actual miracle events as the cause for those stories coming into existence, and such stories abound even though no actual miracle events took place.

Yes, as a generalization, that sounds correct.

But there are patterns to such stories. When a particular case goes against the normal patterns, the generalization may not apply. Also, some stories of weird events or miracles or paranormal experiences may be true, even though most other such stories are fictional.

One pattern is that reputed miracle-workers always enjoyed a long public career of displaying their talent before audiences and accumulating a fan base and a reputation which became publicized. It is unique for a reputed miracle-worker to have only a short public career (less than 5 years) and yet to end up being at or near the top of the list of reputed miracle-workers.

When this happens, there is more reason to believe the reported acts really took place.

Compare Jesus of Galilee to Edgar Cayce for example.

Since there are so many stories about Cayce and such a wide variety of testimonies, one might consider the possibility that he really did have some power to heal, perhaps some of it lying outside the boundaries of current known science.

Nevertheless, in such a case, we know that his vast reputation which he built up over a lifetime has a drawing appeal that can cause fictional stories to be added. So we're entitled to be skeptical when someone claims they were healed by him. It could be just a psychic element based on their knowledge of the famous healer and their strong belief that he had power to heal them, and this belief could have had an impact on their mental process which led to an improvement in their health. Also the patient in some cases is just being dishonest and is engaging in wishful thinking, based on the healer's impressive reputation. Plus there can be fictional stories that the common masses are ready to believe because of the healer's already-established reputation, and these stories can be published and bring profits to the publishers. Telling people what they want to hear is always a profitable business. So the widespread reputaton of the famous healer should make us suspicious of the miracle stories that accumulate around him.

But Jesus of Galilee did not have the advantage of being able to develop a long illustrious career during which to build up a wide reputation as a healer. Obviously today you could say he has that reputation, but not back in 30 AD. And with his career cut short, what happened to further his reputation and finally cause him to become arguably the world's foremost reputed healer?

So, since the case of Jesus goes contrary to the norm of reputed healers, there is less reason to believe fictional stories accumulated around his name, the way they did around the name of Edgar Cayce and other reputed healers.


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For example, even the much venerated Josephus records events which almost certainly never happened...such as flying chariots around Jerusalem, a lunatic Jesus son of Anius who could foresee the future, a mother (coincidentally named Mary) who ate her own child, and much more tabloid nonsense.
Of course there were stories of fictional events. But it does not follow that all accounts of miracle acts or miracle-workers have to be fictional.


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So, for everyone who was not an eyewitness, there was nothing particularly amazing about the claims attributed to Jesus.
Actually, all the stories you listed above as well as the healing stories about Jesus were amazing, IF THEY WERE TRUE -- but of course there's nothing amazing about yet another story that's fictional. And how do they know which is which? Well, if the stories were actually true, the eyewitnesses would surely try to persuade others, and this persuasion would be more intense than in a case where the alleged eyewitnesses know it's not true or are very doubtful. So this greater intensity could persuade others who were not eyewitnesses.

And so you're incorrect to say those not eyewitnesses would be unimpressed or think there was nothing amazing. The persistence of the eyewitnesses would surely have an impact on them and persuade many of them, and this would create the extra energy that caused the reports to spread and the new movement to grow rapidly.

So again, if those miracle stories are essentially true, i.e., there were actual miracle acts done by Jesus which then were reported by word-of-mouth, this would explain the unprecedented phenomenon we have of a widely-reputed miracle-worker (widely-reputed 100 or 200 years later) but whose public career was so short and who was missed by the mainline historians, and further who became made into a god even by people of an entirely alien culture who had no need to adopt this alien barbarian into their lives and make a savior out of him, or let someone else spoon-feed such a savior figure to them. Further, the hypothesis that he really did the miracle acts provides us an explanation why the promoters of the new religion chose the Jesus figure for their god instead of someone of wider repute and higher standing.


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Thus, these claims are not the reason Christianity spread.
It's not why Christianity spread that is at issue, but how the unknown and unlikely figure of this Galilean got promoted to godhead status. We need an explanation how that happened, and the miracle accounts give us a good explanation, i.e., assuming they're essentially true.


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It isn't necessary to identify exactly why it happened in order to dismiss the nonsense. All that is necessary is to identify the existence of a plausible natural explanation -- be it correct or not.
What is the plausible "natural" explanation? I don't think one has been put forth yet.


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Are you telling us you are simply not clever enough to come up with 1 plausible reason why the story might have spread even if the miracles never happened . . .
The best one I can think of so far is that Paul and a wide variety of Christian-gospel inventors somehow all came together at a convention in Athens or Ephesus or Antioch and had a knock-down-drag-out debate on which nobody to choose as the superhero for their new religion, and after beating heads for probably 2 or 3 weeks maybe they finally came up with a group of names of obscure rabblerousers as candidates -- it had to be a long list. These candidates were chosen deliberately for their obscure status, short public life, perhaps also they had to have been murdered so they could be portrayed as martyrs, and a few other characteristics. Then they cast lots and it fell to Jesus the Galilean. Then the organizers of the convention forced everyone into a pledge of secrecy and they all pledged to dedicate their lives to promoting the new cult hero, and of course they invented all the miracle stories and the theologies etc. When they couldn't agree on the exact theology, they just opened it up to whoever wanted to pitch in and so they allowed differing views or interpretations of the new messiah to be adopted into the program.

However, there's no apparent motive for why these organizers went to all this trouble, since there's no profit in it for them. Perhaps they were all wise and saw a need for some social cohesion that the new cult would bring, and they somehow figured out that only an obscure unknown figure with minimum credentials would serve the need. How all these creators of the new religion were able to come together in one place to thrash out the program is a mystery.

A better explanation is simply that Jesus actually did the miracle acts, and so he was made the hero of the new religion because he was an obvious choice -- there was no other comparable choice, no need for a convention to squabble over who to choose, and so the choice took place spontaneously without any "conspiracy" to enthrone the Galilean. Meanwhile, the alternative explanation of the convention of so many different strident factions to put the program together would seem to have been an even greater miracle and thus less to be believed.


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. . . or do you deny that a plausible, albeit unproved, natural explanation always trumps an implausible and unproved supernatural explanation?
All explanations are unproved, we agree on that. The explanation I'm offering is plausible, not implausible. I agree that a plausible "natural" explanation trumps a plausible "supernatural" explanation, all else being equal.

But I'm still waiting to hear the plausible "natural" explanation.

And there is this further consideration: when there are several plausible explanations, there is nothing wrong with "preferring" one you like better, in other words, saying "I hope this is the correct explanation" even though it has doubtful elements in it. An explanation containing miracle acts has to be given a lower probability because of that, all else being equal, and even if there are other explanations of equal plausibility, it is fair to say "I don't know for sure, these are all reasonable possibilities, and I hope the truth is this explanation rather than that one."

And it is wrong to "prefer" an explanation which lies below a certain level of probability or plausibility, even though it is appealing. Defining that lower threshold level is difficult. But in the extreme, if one explanation is 90% probable and another only 1 or 2% probable, then one must choose the 90% probable explanation, even if it is far less attractive. But if the difference is a 50% probable explanation vs. a 40% probable explanation, and the 40% one is more appealing, then there is nothing wrong with choosing the 40% probable explanation and saying, "I don't know which is the truth, but I think this one is a reasonable possibility and I hope it's true," possibly to the point of even acting on that explanation in some cases, even though you know the other explanation has slightly higher probability.

The explanation I have offered, though it contains the "supernatural" element, still is more plausible than the other explanations, i.e., the only implausibility of it is that it contains this element of the miracle acts, which admittedly adds an extra element of doubt, but there should be more reason than this to reject it as long it is otherwise the most plausible explanation.

Obviously no one knows for sure what happened way back then.
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Old 06-29-2009, 11:31 PM   #53
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Originally Posted by freetrader View Post
Diogenes the Cynic:

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By this reasoning, no one without magic powers could ever be remembered.
Yes they could. The point is that Jesus had to have done something noteworthy in order to be remembered and written about later.
Not if he never existed, and "noteworthy" does not -- CANNOT mean he was magical. The roots of the Jesus cult do not appear to have been founded on a tradition that he was a miracle worker, but that he was a prophet or a teacher of sorts.
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If a man never does anything unusual or important or noteworthy, then won't he be forgotten, i.e., by history, by later generations?
If there was ever a real historical Jesus, he pretty much WAS forgotten. The character worshipped by Christians has about as much to do with a real historical figure as Santa Claus has to the real Bishop Niklaus of Smyrna.
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In the process of stripping this and that out of the Jesus story, you need to still leave something there, probably a tad more than just the name, so you grant some element of the original picture that leads to him being remembered and written about later. If you eliminate the whole picture, everything about him, then what is left to serve any later purpose? Why is anyone talking about him? Why are the St. Pauls or other Hellenizers saying anything about him?
They AREN'T talking about him. They're all talking about a mythological character whose possible relationship to any real historical figure has become so obscured by the myth as to render its origins unknowable.
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You could suggest that he was a very good speaker or something, without agreeing to the miraculous element. But you still must grant that he had some unusual feature or capability that made him worth remembering later and being written about.
No I don't. I only have to grant that Paul -- the real inventor of Christianity -- was persuasive enough to persuade a few small communities from the most disenfranchised classes.
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And in the argument here, if you say only that Jesus might have been a good speaker but that is all, then perhaps you've shown how he got written about later (though there were doubtless many wonderful speakers who were totally forgotten), so granting that it's enough to get him notice in the record ("a footnote in history"), you still need more in order to explain how he got made into a god, i.e., you have to come up with more than just the suggestion that he was a good speaker.
You're basically just repeating the same specious assertions over and over again. It was not necessary for Jesus to have even existed at all. Pauline Christianity started with Paul. Paul turned him into a God. Those who inherited Paul's cult made up the miracle stories to make him more competitive with pagan Gods.
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No doubt there were thousands of good speakers, and even though many of them might be remembered for this alone, still this by itself is not enough to cause them to become deified and mythologized and made into an object of worship. Even if the direct acquaintances of Jesus never deified him or worshipped him, still it did happen later. So the question is: how did he come to be finally deified and made the object of mythologizing. How did that process happen?
1. It was commonplace for real human beings to become deified in the ancient world.
2. Paul -- informed by his own psychosis -- decided that Jesus was some sort of dying and resurrecting god. There was nothing extraordinary about that.
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If no one who knew him directly gave him any such special recognition, then he was just an ordinary person with no importance. So then, how does such an ordinary person eventually get mythologized and transformed into a god? Who was it who decided to transform this nobody to make him into a god?
Paul.
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Why did they choose Jesus for this role?
There was no "they," just Paul. He did it because he thought that's what his hallucinations wanted him to do.
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For this to make any sense, there had to be some point where he became noteworthy in some way in his original setting, or he had to do something to make an impression on some one so he would stand out as special or noteworthy. And once he becomes noteworthy, then we can speculate that the religionizers or Hellenizers took notice of him and thought, "Let's make this character our god, let's do a makeover of him and put him into our holy book and say he did miracles and was the son of God." But to do this, they needed something there in the first place, some original figure who was noteworthy enough for them to take such notice of him. What was that noteworthiness?
It is not possible to know what was there in the first place. It is not possible to know for sure that Jesus existed at all. One thing we CAN say for a dead certainty is that he wasn't magic, but if you want a plausible, non-magical hypothesis, here's one:

HJ was an apocalyptic prophet who gained a following by teaching that the "Son of Man" was going to come down from the sky -- just like it was predicted in the Book of Daniel -- to kick Roman ass and liberate the Jews. The he got himself crucified for trying bring about this expected apocalypse by enacting a symbolic attack on the Temple. After his death, his followers scattered. A few months or years later, one of them says he had a vision of Jesus that talked to him and told him he was coming back. A few more followers start claiming to have seen similar visions. The cult is revived wih a new expectation that Jesus himself was the Son of Man, and that he will be along directly to kick those Roman asses.

One particular convert, prone to hallucinations and religious mania begins to believe that Jesus is appearing to him too, and giving him instructions. This new convert exports the cult to the Gentiles where he teaches that Jesus is a divine figure of salvation. Once among the Gentiles, the cult begins to accrete its miracle traditions, and the visionary experiences claimed by the disciples get transformed into a literal resurrection narrative, complete with an empty tomb that never existed in history.

I don't know if this is true, but all of it is plausible, all of it is MUCH more plausible than magic, and it's only one of multiplicity of other hypotheses.
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Assuming that's true, what was incipient to it? How did the cult originally see Jesus? Was he just one more member of the cult with no special position?
The scant evidence we have for the content of the original cult was that he was either a wisdom teacher, an apocalyptic prophet, or some combimation of both. There is no evdience that he was originally perceived as a miracle worker.
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If so, then why was he later chosen by the Hellenizers to become the new Christian god? Did they barge in on a meeting of the cult and just cast lots to choose which of the cultmembers to make into a god?
He wasn't "chosen by Hellenizers," his cult was exported and transformed by Paul, who was motivated by personal psychosis.
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Is there evidence that a single person ever made any claim about him?
There is no recorded eywitness testimony about him at all, but the earliest literature about him records only sayings and parables -- no claims of miracles.
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And yet, there is much about him in the religion they invented, especially in the New Testament collection of writings they handed down. So what happened? How did he get slipped in to the writings when there was nothing noteworthy about him? Who made the decision to sneak him into the holy book, and why? Why did they choose him?
You assertion that Jesus had to have been "noteworthy" has already been shown to be fallacious many times. Jesus need not have existed at all.
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If there are other accounts attesting to miracles he performed, then maybe it's true. We have to consider each alleged case. You don't disprove one case by citing a different unrelated one.
You misunderstand the reason I cited Vespasian. I wasn't citing it to disprove miraculous claims attrubted to Jesus. Impossible claims require no refutation. I was citing the claims about Vespasian to refute your own assertion that there was anything remarkable about the mere claim that a real person could perform healing miracles.
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It can be understood how miracle fictions and myths evolve around a highly celebrated figure who rises to power over decades of clawing his way to the top and claims to be a god and is worshipped as a god by the greatest Empire on the planet and can order anyone's head to be cut off who challenges his claim. It's more difficult to explain how such stories accumulate around a nobody whose public life is sharply ended after only 1-3 years.
No it isn't. Trying to declare this assertion by fiat is getting you nowhere. Once again, the historical Jesus pretty much had nothing to do with the rise of Christianity. The original Palestinian Jesus cult was merely a seed which got exported to the Gentiles and massaged into a more robust, and FGentile friendly cult by Paul. The miracle stories accreted after that. By the time the Gospels were written, it no longer mattered what was going on with the original Palestinian movement (a movement which remained obscure and eventually vanished it its original geographical and cultural context). It had become transformed into something completely different and completely mythological. I mentioned Santa Claus, but I could also point to other examples like King Arthur, Robin Hood, and King David as examples of legends which may have had genuine historical progenators, but which have developed to the point where those possible historical figures are completely irretrievable and effectively irrelevant.

I could also mention wholly fictional characters like Moses and the patriarchs, or Krishna or the Chinese Lao Tse who grew from pure moonshine into figures that believers think were real people.

Whatever the historical Jesus really was -- IF he was -- Paul's audience had no means of knowing or verifying anything about it. They had no choice but to take Paul at his word, so all your claims for any necessary miraculous -- or even "noteworthy" -- phenomena stemming from the original Jesus Palestinian Jesus cult(s) are completely fatuous. It wasn't necessary for a single claom Paul made to be true, it was only necessary for them to believe it was true. Paul himself wasn't even a witness, and even paul made no miraculous claims about Jesus other than the resurrection (an event which he does not even clearly state was physical as opposed to spiritual).
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Assuming that is correct, the question (still not answered by anyone) is: Whoever made up those miracle stories -- why did they choose Jesus as the character to perform these miracles? I.e., these fictional miracles they invented -- why did they choose an unlikely or even unknown Galilean nobody as the character to do these acts?

Why didn't they choose Hillel or John the Baptist or Apollonius of Tyana, all of whom were more widely recognized (assuming Jesus had no reputation for doing any miracles or being important in any way).
They didn't choose him. They were grafting the stories onto a preexisting cult.
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You already know the answer to that -- you have the same evidence I have. We accept as evidence documents written long after the event.
No we don't. Not per se anyway, and NEVER for claims that are physically impossible. Basically, you're admitting that there is no evidence.
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I don't know if we have in any document a quote of someone claiming literally to have "personally seen" Julius Caesar being assassinated, but that doesn't mean there were no witnesses or no evidence of witnesses to the event. If it says in a document from the general period that something happened and someone saw it, that is evidence that it happened and was seen, but no, it's not proof. If the document is from 200 years later, that is less reliable than from a document only 50 years later. And so on.
There is contemporary documentation and corroborating evidence that Julius Caesar was assassinated, but it's a poor comparison because the assertion that Caesar was assassinated does not contain any impossible claims.

There is not even secondary testimony for anyone ever claiming, for instance, to have seen Jesus climb out of a grave. The first claim that Jesus was physically resurrected from a tomb does not occur until 50 years after the alleged event.
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The evidence we have that Jesus did miracles is not the best evidence there could be. But it's as good as evidence we have for many other events which we believe. We always wish we had better evidence than what we have.
The evidence for Jesus performing miracles is absolute zero, and we NEVER accept claims of the impossible. Historians don't actually take ANY purely documentary claims as a given. They may take them as provisionally true, but one of the big provisions is that the claim cannot be physically impossible.
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I don't remember contending any such thing. But to set the record straight, yes, historical figures can accrete supernatural claims. But to do a leap of faith from this to the dogma that all reports of miracle acts in the past have to be fictitious accretions is even more specious
There is no "dogma" in play here. The presumption that impossible claims are impossible is a priori. There is no need to "leap" from anything.
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Wait -- what "mission"? Mission to accomplish what? How do you know he had a "mission"?
He said so.
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Why did he use the term "Christ"? How could this obscure Greek term (Hebrew concept) resonate with his hearers? If you look it up in a lexicon, it's use is almost always from Christian literature, not from Homer or Plato or other Greek source. So why didn't Paul come up with some concept from Greek mythology instead of a name like "Christ"? How did using this alien concept help him promote his "mission"?
He didn't "come up" with it. It was simply the Greek translation of "Messiah" (Anointed). Paul was speaking to Greeks. It's beyond me why yopu think this is extraordinary. Do you really suppose that arguments like this are going to convince people that Jesus must have been magic? I think you are rather easily amazed.
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This isn't Paul you're describing, but Matthew and Luke (and Marx?).
Incorrect. Have you even READ the Pauline corpus. Paul definietly thought Jesus' return was imminent.
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But either way, why did they inject the unlikely Jesus figure into the picture? How did this unknown dead Galilean serve as a tool to communicate these ideas about justice and vengeance and smiting the rich?
He didn't. Paul did
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The question is not why they believed it. The question is: Why did the promoters, the Hellenizers creating this new religion for the Gentiles, choose an unlikely unknown figure as the center hero for this new religion? They could just as easily have picked a beggar randomly off the street.
How many times are you going to ask this same, utterly fatuous question?

"They" didn't choose anything. Paul exported a preexisting cult and shined it up for the Gentiles. The fact that it was Jewish was not a weakness, it merely leant it an air of exotic and mystic allure, perhaps analogous to the way westerners might be drawn to Eastern traditions.
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But where did he get such a message in the first place?
From his own hallucinations. Paul himself explicitly says that he got all his information from his own visions and nowhere else.
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Do you suppose they deliberately chose a nobody? [etc. etc.]
This kind of tedious repetion of the same questions does not make you any more persuasive. This question has been answered over and over again.
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There was plenty of apocalyptic literature to satisfy people's need for such visions of the future, without cluttering up the picture with the Jesus figure.
Really? Like what? Give me some examples of this rich tradition of apocalyptic literature in the Hellenistic world. Specifically, give me some examples of cults which promised an imminent subversion of the social order.
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And there were already-established hero figures to meet their need for a savior who would sweep down and rescue them out of their misery.
Name one.
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Good, all the more reason to give them Enoch or Elijah or Hillel or John the Baptist or Spartacus or Hercules or any of dozens of other better choices than Jesus the Galilean. How about Socrates? He was sacrificed for our sins. Make up miracle stories about him -- those unskeptical gullible Gentiles would have bought that better than the Jesus hero -- if they had chosen Socrates for their messiah, Christianity would have conquered the world much faster and farther
You take up a lot of page space with this repetitious prattle. This is not the devastating argument that you think it is. It's not even provocative. Paul chose Jesus because that's what his psychosis chose for him. It's just that simple.
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Did Paul himself believe his own message? Did he really believe Christ resurrected? If so, why did he believe it? He must have heard this from others who believed it. Who were they?
Now I KNOW you haven't read Paul. Paul himself explicitly says that he got all his information directly from Jesus and specifically denies that he got it "from any man." I repeat, he DENIES that he learned it from others and claims that he got it all from his visions of Jesus.
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There is evidence, which you're already aware of.
No. actually I'm NOT aware of it. I don't think you have a very strong understanding of what the word ":evidence" actually means.
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You mean the healing stories. Probably the Mishnah writers and many others did not believe the stories. Things happen that not everyone believes. That doesn't mean they didn't happen or that no one at all believed them.
I mean any miracle stories at all, and no one has to prove miracles did NOT happen. That is always the default assumption. You are the one with the burden to prove they did.
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We can distinguish between stories that are more likely to be true and ones that are less likely. Some are like "add-on" or "me-too" stories which were invented to supplement (in the story-teller's mind) the earlier authentic stories, but they end up eventually being more a detraction from the original stories. Just because there are fictional stories in the accounts does not mean all the stories are fiction, or all the miracle stories. The reasonable approach is to discern the difference between what is credible and what is fictional, or to assign higher probability to some reports and lower probability to others. The story of the corpses rising and invading Jerusalem is obviously on a very low degree of probability compared to the miracle healing stories.
All claims of miracles are impossible by definition. The miraculous healing stories are no less impossible than the zombie assault on Jerusalem.
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Absolute impossibility would only be something contradictory, like 2=3, up=down, etc. For all else, it is just a matter of higher and lower probability. "Impossible" in a practical sense might be something with a .0000000000001% probability. That some healings have happened which were done outside the confines of known medicine is highly probable. I'll guess over 90% probable.
This is a completely baseless assertion.
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On the other hand, when more details are added, about specific healers and specific dates and specific victims who were healed, the probability goes way down. But it's still over 50% in some cases. To absolutely rule out all such healings ipso facto, no matter what, is unscientific and irrational. To say the probability is low in many or most cases -- yes, it might be low in most cases. It's not easy to precisely calculate the probability of such things.
These numbers are truly astonishing in their shameless arbitrariness. The odds of any miracle are zero. Zero times a trillion is still zero.
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Magic is never an intelligent hypothesis to explain anything.
If this is a way of saying nothing can ever happen that is unexplainable within the currently-known science, you are certainly mistaken.
Nothing can happen which violates physical laws. If you can cite a single verifiable example of this happening, let's see it.
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Old 06-30-2009, 02:06 AM   #54
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Originally Posted by freetrader View Post
Obviously no one knows for sure what happened way back then.
The boys and girls in the C14 laboratory might have something to say to the likes of your suppositions.

Citation (1): 290 CE +/- 60 years (gJudas) - estimated 4th century by the lab and archaeological team.
Citation (2): 348 CE +/- 60 years (gThomas, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, TAOPATTA, etc, etc, Nag Hammadi).

Where are the carbon dated historical Jesus "Goggles"? What century is this now?
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Old 07-01-2009, 07:41 AM   #55
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In other words, stories of unlikely events like miracles are easy to explain without needing any actual miracle events as the cause for those stories coming into existence, and such stories abound even though no actual miracle events took place.

Yes, as a generalization, that sounds correct.

But there are patterns to such stories. When a particular case goes against the normal patterns, the generalization may not apply.
I've seen this type of argument innumerable time. In a nutshell, the argument is that unless there is a pattern for *this exact thing*, then it must be true. But if that were true, then all miracle claims would have to be rooted in historical miracles, because each one was at one time a unique claim with no precedent.

I allow for human creativity, even (especially?) within the domain of religion. Do you not?

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One pattern is that reputed miracle-workers always enjoyed a long public career of displaying their talent before audiences and accumulating a fan base and a reputation which became publicized. It is unique for a reputed miracle-worker to have only a short public career (less than 5 years) and yet to end up being at or near the top of the list of reputed miracle-workers.
Even if we simply accept the gospel claims of a 1-3 year ministry at face value, the difference between 1-3 years vs. 5 years is simply not enough to give credence to the miracle claims. Further, even if we use the ridiculously early apologetic datings for the NT, a minimum of decades went by after Jesus' death before Christianity started to really catch on, meaning that Jesus was *not* at the top of the list during his life time, but rather, it was his followers who popularized him later on.
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Old 07-01-2009, 10:49 AM   #56
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The Comparison to Apollonius of Tyana, compliments of Mountainman

There's no basis for equating Jesus of Galilee to Apollonius of Tyana in terms of the historical credibility of the two reputed historical figures. For the latter there is no evidence outside one writing penned 200 years after his life. Whereas for the former there are many written references within 100 years and far more within the following 100 years from when he lived.

Further, due to the blatant duplicating of biblical accounts of Jesus, it is obvious that the Apollonius story is really a copycat version of the former which had been in circulation for some period and was used by the early 3rd-century writer as source material.

And apparently no one earlier believed the Apollonius legend because it was not passed on in any form other than popping up in our one source 200 years distant.

This is not a serious comparison. This would be like someone writing a fictional version of Abraham Lincoln, who supposedly does some of the same deeds, and then 1000 years later Lincoln skeptics could argue that the original Lincoln account must be fictional because of its resemblance to the later fictional version.
I don't follow the logic of your argument and I assure you that it is not obvious that the figure of Apollonius is a copy of Jesus any more than it is obvious that Jesus originates as a ripoff of Horus.

But to your OP: I consider it unlikely that the original fame of Jesus proceeded from his performing healing and assorted miracles although I believe he used a controversial form of baptism which on occasion produced the phenomena of the "spirit" (Mk 1:8) with which his name became enmeshed after his death. I have been intrigued by the explicit denial that Jesus baptized by John (4:2) in the light of his transparent re-writing of an earlier text of a baptismal mishap in Lazarus.

That Jesus became a healer only later, through gospel allegory, is best attested by Paul. Paul makes no references to the earthly Jesus, but to spritual gifts in his congregations, of which a healing ability is one (1 Cr 12:9, 30). It is through the (holy) spirit that one also testifies that Jesus Christ is the Lord (1 Cr 12:3). These associations then become the allegorical baseline to Jesus in the gospels. He himself performs miraculous cures, some of which (like restoring sight and hearing) are themselves metaphors for the attainment of spiritual faculties. Jesus transfers, as it were, the healing (and exorcism) gifts in commissioning his apostles. (Mk 3:14, Mt 10:8). The mighty works are done in Jesus' name (Mk 9:39).

Jiri
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Old 07-01-2009, 05:47 PM   #57
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Default Everyone did miracles but Jesus.

rfmwinnie:

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And to add to this Jewish literature at the time abounds with faith healers and miracle workers. Included in this is the man who stood in a circle to make it rain, rabbis who resurrected people from the dead, sages who could feed multitudes with little food, wise men who could control all manners of storms and other natural phenomena.
I once spent several hours searching for examples of the above (from 100 BC to 100 AD) and found almost nothing. There was one story about a rabbi of some kind who could perform a magic trick and accumulated quite a reputation over 50 years or so of doing this one trick in public before disciples and other onlookers. But he never would have been mentioned in the record books if he had not spent all those decades performing his art in public to build up his reputation.

I'd like to see somone produce these examples, or just one. How about the best example you can find of a reputed faith healer or miracle worker of the period, who (reputedly) did a large number of healings which were witnessed (according to the accounts) and eventually recorded within 100 years and who was not a celebrity who had a long career in which to amass a large number of fans or disciples.

It's easy to say "Oh there were tons of reputed faith-healers and wonder-workers who made it rain and resurrected dead bodies etc. etc." But when someone who says this has to provide particular examples of these practitioners, it turns out there's really very little there, and the few cases that do exist are always celebrities who made a long career of doing stunts before audiences and gaining a minor mention from an historian.

But aside from that, a few of these might be real examples of people who had some unusual talent. One should not automatically dismiss all such stories as fictional. Perhaps in most cases there was a technique ("magic"?) involved which was done within the confines of the known science of the time. But perhaps also in some cases there were techniques mastered by a practitioner which were not explainable by the current science of the time, or maybe even by today's known science.

There are odd cases of people who have an unusual ability which defies a known scientific explanation or defies "common sense" -- in some cases it is a skill or talent which generally requires years of training to develop, but in these odd cases a person seems to acquire it quickly (perhaps in early childhood) without any training. You can say that science will someday come to figure it out, after further research, but then that could also be said of any claims of miracle acts, such as healings outside current medical science.

So is it true Jewish literature "abounds" in miracle events or rainmakers and sorcerors etc.? OK, a few obscure references, if you search quite a bit. But it doesn't mean much unless we look at particular examples of it -- just one or two examples would be enough -- and compare them to the case of Jesus to see if they really are in the same category, or if by comparison to him it is more probable or less probable that they had real power to perform such acts, and also, if they did have some real talent, what were the limits of their ability? -- just being able to perform one or two magic tricks, like we know magicians can do and can teach someone else, would not be a comparable case.

Give a couple examples we can look at more closely.


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And yet, in all of this, there is nary a mention of Jesus?
You mean during his lifetime. Again, his public career was two short -- the recorded examples you can come up with (if any) were of celebrities who had a long career.


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It was common to record those events and no one recorded a single one about Jesus?
It's not clear what "It was common to record those events" means. The miracle events of Jesus were recorded, but if you mean during the life of the writer/historian, i.e., events contemporary with the writer -- most of the recorded miracle stories in history certainly do not fit that description -- In that period most of them were not written down until centuries later.

However, let's grant that there are a few vague references to persons who did magic tricks during the lifetime of the historian who wrote about it -- or only 20-30 years prior to the historian. This may be the case assuming the one reported lived a long career of performing before audiences or was a widely-known celebrity.

But this does not apply in a case where the person's public life was only 1-3 years. I would like to know if there is a single other case of an historical figure who had such a short public life but who ended up becoming widely recognized as a performer of miracle cures.


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"what if Jesus really did miracles?" I think other explanations are far more likely.
Hopefully someone will offer one. So far they haven't.
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Old 07-01-2009, 05:53 PM   #58
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...

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"what if Jesus really did miracles?" I think other explanations are far more likely.
Hopefully someone will offer one. So far they haven't.
How about the explanation "someone made up the story?" It's much more likely than is the idea that Jesus violated the laws of nature for a short period of time.
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Old 07-01-2009, 06:36 PM   #59
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"what if Jesus really did miracles?" I think other explanations are far more likely.
Hopefully someone will offer one. So far they haven't.
The many gentile churches that Paul founded, from which modern Christianity came from (none of the Jewish churches seem to be among those from the "Apostolic Fathers") didn't seem to need miracle stories for Paul to proselytize.

You seem to be under the impression that Christianity was spread by Jesus. Christianity was spread by Paul so you're looking in the wrong place for your miracles. Maybe Paul did miracles and that's why his letters make up half of the entire New Testament?

As a matter of fact, name the first Christian who cites some "miracle stories" about Jesus.
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Old 07-01-2009, 06:58 PM   #60
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Dear freetrader,

You still have not explained to me why God would create such an obscure son?

AND - expect everyone else to carry his water for him - i.e. create (or for your benefit: propagate) his story?

Gregg
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